Useful links for
English Language (Discourse, stylistics,
theatre) students
Please go to Anthea Fraser Gupta’s page which contains a lot of links to
web sites for English Language students:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/english/links.html
She also has a web page on
relevant readings on Singapore English
(http://www.leeds.ac.uk/english/$staff/afg/singeb2.html)
Julie Coleman has a useful
website on English grammar, including Old English and quizzes that will be
marked on line: http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/jmc21/legp/index.html
Reinhard
Hahn has an extensive list of links on the English language:
http://www.geocities.com/sassisch/rhahn/lowlands/links_english.htm
Marcus Laker
also has a page which contains lots of links to sites for people interested in
language, especially readers of the newsgroup alt.usage.english:
http://homepages.tcp.co.uk/~laker/aue/
That discussion group is also
worth a visit, although there is a certain amount of silliness in some of the
postings, as would be expected in many unmoderated
news groups.
There are many on-line
dictionaries, but my favourite is the Oxford English Dictionary on-line
or OED online. (If this
does not work, click on http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/digital/index.html then select
‘Dictionaries and Encyclopaedia’ under Browse by type of material, then
click on ‘Oxford English Dictionary’.) Unfortunately, it is only available by
subscription; fortunately, NUS is a subscriber. It is updated regularly. It got
Malaysians very hot under the collar recently when it described lah as belonging to Singaporean (rather than
Malaysian) English!
George Landow’s
site on Contemporary
Post-Colonial and Post-Imperial Literature in English also contains a small
collection of pages on English
in Singapore and Malaysia
(http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/post/singapore/people/language/english.html)/
The Oxford Text Archive has an extensive list of
online texts that can be downloaded for free (you need to supply your email
address); some texts require a form to be sent by post first.
The English Company
(http://www.english.co.uk/) has a web site on the global spread and the
international use of English.
If you are interested in
words and wordplay, try the Wordsmith site
(http://www.wordsmith.org) where they have a vocabulary mailing list (A Word A
Day), an anagram generator (Internet Anagram Server),
among other things.
Wicked stuff for English learners
(http://www.stuff.co.uk/wicked.htm) is a fun site not only for learners of
the language, but if you like playing with language.
There is an electronic dictionary of British slang
(http://www.peevish.u-net.com/slang/) which is also great fun.
There is a course on Language and Learning Awareness
(http://www.go-ed.com/nec/index.html) that is also useful and interesting.
J C Wells has a website on Estuary English
(http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/home.htm) which might be of
interest to those who are keen on accents. There are also lots of links there.
Peter
Trudgill’s book Accents (1994) (http://angli02.kgw.tu-berlin.de/html/dialects.html/dl01.html)
is available from the Institut für
Linguistik (Technische
If you want to use phonetic
symbols, you can download IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) fonts from SIL
(formerly, Summer Institute of Linguistics) International website: SIL IPA fonts
If you have those in your
computer, you should see some IPA fonts here: jUd bE/«
kNIT
«StnU«d
U«g
Alternatively, you can try
the Times New
Roman Phonetic font. If you have that in your computer you should see some
IPA fonts here: jUd bE?@ g@U d@UntS@ TINk
Here is a link to a site on
the presence of Viking loanwords in English: (http://www.viking.no/e/england/e-viking_english.htm)
Here are some links on
corpus linguistics:
·
Corpus Linguistics by Tony McEnery
and Andrew Wilson
·
British National Corpus (BNC)
- English
Language Corpora and Corpus resources at BNC
·
The Survey of English
usage (University College London)
·
University
centre for computer corpus research on language at Lancaster University
You can get hold of electronic texts from these sites:
- University of Virginia Electronic Text Centre (UVa) a large collection of English texts, eg Old English Corpus (3000 texts); medieval
texts (eg Canterbury Tales); Shakespeare;
and modern texts.
- Birmingham Corpus Linguistics Page
- The English
Department, University of Toronto has a very good electronic
collection of English poetry, including notes and comments. 336 poets (from
Old English, through Chaucer and Shakespeare to
the 20th century) are represented, the last time I entered their website.
There are
lots of dictionary sites available:
- the Oxford English Dictionary
online is available by subscription: http://www.oed.com
- www.dictionary.com is not a bad
place to start
- if you’re interested in an Old
English dictionary, try the freeware dictionary program, available from http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/old_english.html
- there’s also a Middle English
(print) dictionary – Mayhew and Skeat’s A Concise Dictionary of Middle English –
that’s available from the
Of course, if you prefer to
buy your own books, there are many reasonable on-line bookshops, some of which
offer discounts. The problem with most is that they charges for postage and
packing (the American term for this, ‘shipping’, seems to be used more and more
- rather intriguing to me initially as items often do not come by ship!)
can represent a high percentage of the cost, particularly if you want single
copies. To overcome this, you can try Singaporean bookshops, like
Other noteworthy on-line
bookshops include:
·
Amazon.com, and its British counterpart Amazon.co.uk for British-published books
You can go into the home
pages of some of the people who have written books and articles relevant to
English Language studies. There are frequently multiple links in these pages,
and sometimes it is just nice to put a face to a name and find out what their
other interests are.
If you have any suggestions
about other links that could be included here, or if you find a broken link,
please email me at PeterTan@leonis.nus.edu.sg.